4 years from now 800M people will access their social networks over their cell phone

There’s only one newsletter that I open every day: eMarketer’s. Today they quote a series of different forecasts for the ‘mobile social networking’ space:

• ABI Research (SEP 2008): More than 140 million mobile (paying!) subscribers will use social networks on their phones by 2013, generating over $410 million in subscription revenues. This forecast is lower than its previous estimates. In December 2006, they forecasted 174 million users by 2011.
• Pyramid Research (FEB 2008): There will be 950 million (paying and non-paying) mobile social networking users by 2012.
• Juniper Research (AUG 2007): The number of (paying and non-paying) mobile social networking users will rise to 600 million by 2012.
• eMarketer (SEP 2008): Concludes that the trueth of the latter two sources must be in the middle, and predicts that more than 800 million registered site members (paying and non-paying) will use their mobile phones to access social networks by 2012:

I think these numbers are entirely realistic. I am already using Belysio to access my networks on Facebook, LinkedIn, Xing and MySpace – and I’ll certainly use it to browse my other networks as soon as Belysio will facilitate that. Accessing my communities over my cell phone simply bridges the gap between sitting behind my laptop to “administrate” my contacts, and meeting or communicating with them in real life.

Tags: Belysio, Chat, Contact management service, File sharing, Friend finder, Gateway, Geo journal, Geo location, GPS, Instant messenger, Location based services, Mobile app, Mobile marketing, Mobile phone, Mobility, Presence, Social navigator, Social radar, Telecom, Text, Web2.0